IPvFox, my favorite new plug-in

Now that I have a functioning IPv6 network, I can actually “see” how much of the public Internet (or at least web sites) are IPv6. Before I had the home net on IPv6, I was limited to just using DNS queries for AAAA records (over IPv4).

My new favorite FireFox plug-in is IPvFox, which gives me IPv6/IPv4 information right in the URL “awesome bar”. I can tell at a glance, if the current page’s data was served over IPv6, IPv4 or mixed.

Here are a few images showing which sites/pages are loaded via IPv6, IPv4, or both.

This first one is interesting, ipv6.google.com. As you can see from the image, the main page (URL) is IPv6 (big green “6”), but other parts of the page loaded via IPv4 (little red “4”). Clicking on the 6/4 image in the URL bar shows you which parts loaded which way. The main URL is IPv6, but the other parts of the page loaded over IPv4. Note that plus.google.com loads over IPv4.

This next one is ipv6-test.com. Again the main page loads via IPv6, but the other content on the page is loaded from a combination of other sites running IPv4 and IPv6.

Here’s another IPv6 test site, test-ipv6.com. This one uses IPv4 for the main site, and then pulls elements over IPv6 and IPv4.

As one of the newest of Google’s Internet properties, it is not unexpected that plus.google.com loads over IPv6, at least in this example. Go back and look at the first example, however, where it loaded over IPv4. Strange…. However, the “+1” system is still IPv4:

As I do my daily browsing, it’s interesting which sites come up over IPv6, and which don’t. I’m seeing more media and social sites on IPv6, and very few vendor sites. I had expected to see much more IPv6 from the big network kit vendors, but they are noticeably missing. Some of them “do” IPv6 on a separate host (ipv6.google.com, for example).